How to Use SEO to Grow Your Business (ft.Ahref)

If you want to succeed in the competitive game of Google search, you need a lot of data about what's happening across the Internet. I'm talking petabytes of data. Big, big data. Tools like Ahrefs gather data by constantly crawling the web for search traffic, backlinks, keywords and more, then giving anyone easy to use access to all of that information. Understanding the insights these tools generate is essential to staying competitive in content marketing. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot. In this video, we're going to show you how Ahrefs takes advantage of their own SEO insight tools to capture valuable organic traffic and how you can apply these tools to your own content marketing. Check out the links in the description for tools you can use to start increasing your traffic right now. And if you like this video, give it a like and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel. If you're an SEO expert, you probably recognize Sam oh. He's the host of Ahrefs YouTube channel who teaches tens of thousands of users how to optimize their online presence using Ahrefs.

So I joined in 2018. I think our blog was at around 40 to 50,000 monthly search visits globally at that time. And now we're over half a million just for our blog.

Ahrefs content team has turned their blog into an S E R P dominating machine, ranking in search results for over 1,250 keywords. You might be thinking, of course they rank well. They're literally the guys who made the tools. I can't do that. Wrong, you can. I believe in you. But you need to change your attitude. Any marketer can use these same tools Ahrefs uses to make intelligent decisions about their own content marketing campaigns. Unlike the Krabby Patty, there is no secret formula here. It's all right in the app. Just ask Sam.

Literally 99.99% of everything I do related to SEO is in Ahrefs.

So what exactly does Ahrefs do? It's a web crawling monster that has indexed over 5 billion pages, 11 billion keywords, and 25 trillion backlinks. All that data is at your fingertips. You just need to know how to use it. Let's start with something straightforward that every inbound marketer can use. How can Ahrefs identify organic keyword opportunities? I'll let Sam explain.

So generally speaking, we'll start with keywords explorer and so we'll start with the seed keyword. So we might type in broad keywords related to our niche. So that might be like SEO link building technical SEO keyword research. And then we're actually going to look at the different keywords and the metrics that come up.

Those metrics include search volume, meaning the average monthly number of searches for a keyword, and clicks, the average monthly number of clicks on the search results that people make while searching for the target keyword. Nifty. It also includes keyword difficulty, which is an estimate of how hard it can be to rank number one for a keyword. The lower the difficulty score, the easier it can be to rank. Now, you might assume that the higher the search volume and clicks, the more desirable a keyword would be. But to hear Sam tell it, chasing the biggest numbers isn't always the smartest strategy.

People tend to get lost with search volume and they basically think that high search volume equals high traffic. So we take a different approach in the sense that we just look at traffic potential.

That was the thinking behind one of Ahrefs top ranking blog posts, how to submit your website to search engines in 2021.

So the search volume on this is 1100 in the US and if we go down to the SERP, I think we're ranking number one for it. You'll see that we're actually getting an estimated 6,300 monthly search visits. So in the case that someone were to look at this and they're like, oh, that's not that exciting, I'd rather go for something like SEO, which has like 100,000 monthly search visits, we're taking advantage of these kinds of opportunities.

Those opportunities can add up to big traffic over the long run. HubSpot uses keyword insights like these from Ahrefs to inform our quarterly Blog Insights reports. This strategic document outlines the blog content we're going to focus on to maximize organic reach. If you want to learn how to use Ahrefs insights to build your own report, check out the link in the description.

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Identifying keywords is just one of the many SEO strategies Ahrefs can help you accomplish. Another is building backlinks, which is an area Sam is particularly fond of. For driving Ahrefs own blog success. Now we already have a video talking about how to build backlinks, kind of like Glassdoor has. But basically backlinks mean that another website links to your content, citing you as an authority on that particular topic. And we like that. We like authority. Generally speaking, the more backlinks you have, the higher your content will rank in search. And without backlinks, you have almost no chance of ranking. It's truly unfortunate.

Yes, you can get some success with certain low competition topics, but once you start heading into the more commercial competitive topics, like you have no chance of ranking without links.

Some people have suggested that Google has deprioritized backlinks when calculating their search rankings. But SEO experts like Sam aren't buying it.

And I also see a lot of people recently talking saying that backlinks don't matter. Anyone who's had any success in SEO, like they'll scoff and laugh at that because backlinks still matter and they probably still will matter for the foreseeable future.

The thing about building backlinks is that it's hard. Not only do you have to develop content worth linking to, but you have to do outreach to let others know that your content is out there.

Nobody likes to do link building because they're cold emails and yada yada yada. Success rate is usually in the single digit percentages. Even for us, certain topics, like we're just being outranked by sites that have been around longer. Like Moz has had their beginner's guide to SEO for I think over a decade now. We basically just released one and we might have 200 referring domains, but they have, I don't know, 3,000 as of this video.

Moz still holds the number one spot, but there's another coveted search result that Ahrefs was recently able to capture. SEO stats Stats pages are great for gaining backlinks because most bloggers, when citing a stat, will link back to the source. The challenge is if someone else's stats page is in the top two or three results of the search page. Most people who Google for those stats will use one of the first few results. This creates more backlinks and perpetuates more authority. To break the cycle, Sam used Ahrefs to gather some deep intel on the top page, which at the time belonged to Search Engine Journal. Using Ahrefs Site Explorer, he looked at the anchor text for all the backlinks pointing towards the page and saw that a few stats were responsible for most of the links. He then checked the stats and discovered that several of them were out of date. From there it was just a matter of creating a blog post with the current stat, then contacting the website, linking to search engine journal, all 822 of them, and suggesting they change their post to link to the new up to date Ahrefs post Postie. This might seem like a ton of work, but a lot of outreach can be automated. Try a word web scraper like Screen Frog to cull email addresses. Then use a CRM like HubSpot to send a personalized message. Something like hello, it's your boy, I miss you. Xoxo. You can also use HubSpot's integration with LinkedIn to send messages via InMail, which can generate two to three times more responses than sending cold emails. And remember, the work you put into generating backlinks doesn't just help traffic for this one, it increases overall domain authority, which lifts all of your posts in Google's eyes. Nice if you want to see this backlink strategy in greater detail. So I made a three part tutorial on the Ahrefs YouTube page that we linked to in the description and ask yourself what stats are you going to post when this video is over? But before you go, let's talk about one more of Ahrefs features, YouTube optimization. You might not think about it, but YouTube is actually the second most popular search engine in the world, the first being Google. And since YouTube is owned by Google, there's a lot of integration between search results. That means smart content marketers can double dip to get traffic from both Google and YouTube. And normally double dipping is a huge party foul. It's an instant way to let anyone know that yeah, you're a noob, but here it's good. You can use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to get search volume and click data for keywords in YouTube just like you do for Google. Or you can see what other successful YouTube creators have done by going to Ahrefs Content Explorer and using the Google Advanced Search Operators to search for your topic on YouTube. Sort by page traffic, then find a post with consistent traffic. Click on that post, then check out the organic keywords to see what it ranks for and consider if that's a keyword worth going after. From there you can optimize your content on page when uploading the video. You can even optimize for keywords in the video itself since YouTube automatically transcribes each video. But just like a blog, don't stuff keywords in the video because the same Google algorithms apply keyword research, backlink building, and YouTube optimization are just a few of the SEO strategies Ahrefs can help you execute. For more info on Ahrefs, watch sam on their YouTube page. I mean, come on, you can't not. You know, he's a good dude. And be sure to follow us here at HubSpot for all the angles in building your inbound marketing empire. Now, if you'll excuse me. Time to go double dipping. I'll see you out there. If you're an SEO. Export export. Sir.

What?

Okay.